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The Cub Codacil

As an addendum to the Cub Report, I present to you a pictorial journey through the first structures of Alex’s imagination.

The journey begins, with a view of the island from shore. Notice the torches, and how he started with wood, then began upgrading afterwards to stone.

Here we see, close up, the first rough signal tower he built with torches to be seen from a distance.

Here is the upstairs bedroom of his cozy island house. And, like all proper bedrooms, there is a trapdoor emergency hatch so you can escape if cornered by bad guys… or homework.

Here we see, from the island bridge, his first forays into building a treehouse. Oh yes, those are stone stairs circling that tree. Yes they are.

No, really, those are stone stairs to be proud of. Curious fact, chickens can and WILL hop onto and follow you up stairs all the way to the top… and if you then remove blocks from behind them, you’ve got a treed chicken.

At least, so I’ve been told by the under ten set.

And now we see the fortress that Alex has made in Creative mode. It started out as being open, and the most recent addition is that massive wall circling the whole damn thing. From this view you can see how tall the whole thing is, the two glowstone towers with trapdoors in the foreground that lead to the underwater viewing chambers, the lava and water towers, and the distant lighthouse with glowstone on top.

A closer view, easier to see the lava and water towers. You know, if enemies storm that courtyard and he opens the bottom bricks to release all that water and lava at once, I think they’d be pretty steamed up about it. You’d have to be half baked to even consider attacking it.

Here you can see how, once landed on top of a glowstone tower (with trapdoor), Wolfie has decided to show up. How does that dog do dat?

From this view, you can get a better idea how tall the lava tower is, and how far down that grassy courtyard is. Those are double doors leading into the fully furnished multi-story redstone castle.

What castle would be complete without petting zoo? And yep, those are eggs. Lots of torches too, guess zoo critters don’t need sleep much.

Here we see a lovely interior shot of the dog house, with low one block size entryway that the wolf can walk through, but not Alex, because as he put it, “Sometimes I bet Wolfie would like some privacy.” Also note the WoW-style training dummies in lime green, clearly marked with bow and arrow signs, so you know what weapons you’re supposed to use here.

And yes there are bows and arrows, and when arrows hit something, they stay stuck there until you brush them off. A nice touch, that one.

And finally, a closer picture of Wolfie. He does seem happy with his home, doesn’t he?

So I’m surprised no one mentioned it, but there are a ton of very pretty texture packs for Minecraft. I’m using Enchanted by Steelfeathers at the moment, but one of the really popular ones is Sphax BDcraft which I’ve used in the past. It gives a cartoony feeling, almost kinda like wow. You’ll need to get an HD patcher (a mod that lets you use higher resolution texture packs) in order to use any of the higher resolution versions until the game updates to fully support all texture sizes but the 16×16 one should work out of the box.

This has more information about the two main HD patchers available, I’ve used both, both seem fine.

The site is http://bdcraft.net/ or you could just look it up on google if you don’t trust links.

Also, http://diamondboots.com/ is a really nice pocket reference site for item recipes, if you have something like an iphone handy.

I love what the Cub has done…especially the tree house. Oh to see through the eyes of a child again. I don’t think I could be that creative.

I fiddled with the online demo for Minecraft last night. I’m not sure if it’s Firefox friendly or not, or was being overly glitchy, but I couldn’t do a whole lot. A lot of times while I was left clicking to collect/whack stuff it would kick me to the menu. Also, I’m not sure how much they limit what you can do in the demo but I couldn’t even make the crafting table…it wouldn’t let me separate my stacks of wood planks in the crafting window. I finally got tired of that and decided I’d just buy it and ran into problems there as well. It kept hanging up on the “verify” page for my credit card. I tried 3 or 4 times and nothing…all the while thinking, “Ugh, I hope I’m not buying 3-4 copies of this game”.

I’d have to ask the master how he did it, but making training dummies is a ‘thing’ he likes to do. I have a LEGO training dummy selection on my desk, for my panda Mega-bloks guy to fight when I’m bored.

Fantastic to see Alex being so creative! I would strongly recommend getting another Minecraft account and playing cooperatively. My hubby liked MC, I liked MC, but it really took off when we set up our own LAN server and started playing together. Playing MC with someone is exponentially more fun. A lot of my WoW guild got into it as well towards the end of Cata–we set up a shared server and had a great time. Hard to recommend multiplayer MC adequately. :)